[NYTr] Bush, Iran and the Politics of Doomsday

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

CounterPunch - Dec 7, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/smith12072007.html

When One's World Turns Upside Down

Bush, Iran and the Politics of Doomsday

By Col. DAN SMITH

Today is the anniversary of the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor
by the Imperial Japanese Navy. For the individuals who died, for their
families, it was a day in which the personal worlds of thousands were
suddenly turned upside down. When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
asked Congress for a declaration of war, the entire country’s
political, economic, and social worlds turned upside down as 12 million
men and women donned uniforms and women entered new jobs on the home
front.

As I write this Thursday morning, December 6, it has been about 100
hours since excerpts from the latest U.S. National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear capabilities became public knowledge
around the world.

It is also about 75 hours since President Bush’s news conference on
December 3 during which he declared the NIE’s findings changed nothing.
Quite the contrary, Bush insisted that the NIE reinforced the
administration’s approach: hold low-level discussions in Bagdad between
the U.S. and Iranian ambassadors to Iraq; insist that Iran comply with
UN Security Council demands that Tehran halt uranium enrichment as a
precondition for any high-level direct negotiations with Washington;
and impose another round of stiff international sanctions on Tehran.

And it is roughly 50 hours since President Bush arrived in Omaha,
Nebraska Tuesday and declared that Tehran must “come clean” about its
nuclear weapons ambitions and programs.

The phrase “come clean” recalled to mind two essays written in July and
September 2003. Unbeknownst to the public, press, and pundits at the
time, this was the transitional period for the invading forces. In
these three months, the foreign soldiers lost the image of liberators
and were saddled with the stigma of occupiers – their world turned
upside down. It was also the period during which the full extent of the
administration’s tampering with intelligence began to be apparent to
all but the most doctrinaire observers.

Next door in Iran, the ayatollahs saw new instability in an already
instable region of the world. Afghanistan and Iraq, two neighbors, had
been invaded by U.S. forces, their governments overthrown and replaced
by pro-western regimes, and now hosted 160,000 U.S. troops.. And while
the Afghanistan venture was obviously retaliation for the al-Qaeda
terror attacks on September 11, 2001, the March 2003 assault on Iraq
was an example of the “Bush Doctrine” of “preventive war” applied to
regimes that, in addition to secretly pursuing nuclear technology and
knowledge, were deemed by Washington to be unfriendly.

The challenge for the ayatollahs in 2007 is in many ways the same one
that Saddam had faced in 2003: how to prove a negative – that there
were no weapons or programs to acquire weapons of mass destruction when
the U.S. government incessantly insisted that there were. The only way
to do this was to expose the manipulation of intelligence by the Bush
White House as it sought congressional support against first Iraq and
now against Iran.

All the ayatollahs can offer in defense are the lessons of the Iraq
confrontation. In the four months before the invasion, UN inspectors
had found no weapons and no programs for acquiring weapons of mass
destruction – facts that at least denied the administration any
official UN backing for attacking Iraq. Similarly, during the six
months after the invasion, the 1,400 hand-picked inspectors of the U.S.
Iraq Survey Team also failed to find any of the nuclear, biological, or
chemical weapons the Bush administration alleged Saddam possessed.

So it seems that Saddam had been playing an elaborate shell game right
up to the end. His nuclear weapons ploy not only kept regional enemies
at bay but was convincing enough to fool western analysts that Iraq’s
nuclear program remained potentially active. Analysts succumbed to
classic mirror imaging because they simply could not imagine why Saddam
would endure harsh UN sanctions and scores of foreigners running around
his country unless he had a hidden program he planned to restart after
inspections ended.

Whether it’s about Iraq in 2003 or Iran in 2007, the Middle East is a
rough neighborhood. Any perception of weakness risks another country
taking advantage of the situation. Thus the best defense is the
appearance of a strong offense, which Saddam tried to portray – and did
until his son-in-law, Hussein Kemal, “betrayed” him to western and UN
intelligence agents. These, unfortunately, simply did not believe that
the weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed in 1991 and programs
stopped.

As is clearly evident with this new NIE on Iran, the intelligence
professionals have relearned something about their craft: when everyone
agrees on everything, start over and find the contradiction or the
omission that, if pursued, “turns the world upside down.”

That is the message of the key findings of the NIE: the Intelligence
Community finds with “high confidence” that Tehran “halted its nuclear
weapons program in 2003” and further finds with “moderate confidence”
that this program has not been restarted.” The question remaining is
for how long Tehran will sustain this hiatus – especially if the Bush
administration refuses to change its stance.

The other fact -- highly dangerous -- the ayatollahs must weigh is
Bush’s insistence that Iran “come clean,” a demand that indicates that
Bush, unlike the Intelligence Community, still has learned nothing of
the psychology of the Middle East. In the end, it is the political
professionals, not the intelligence analysts, who make policy and
implement programs. When the politicians let ideology override the
facts, the mistakes of the past inevitably become the mistakes of the
future. How else can one explain the efforts by conservative
fear-mongering pundits to embrace a tortured interpretation of the
latest report of the IAEA on Iran’s nuclear programs?

The moral is simple. If one believes in witches and warlocks, one will
be able to find evidence they exist and eventually the actual beings.
The administration and the world believed Saddam had weapons, and he
obliged by dropping hints and acting as if he were hiding something.

The White House is trying to convince the public that Iran is another
Iraq and is an imminent danger to the world. But this time, the world
is not buying. The administration’s ploy this time will not turn
anyone’s world upside down.


[Col. Dan Smith, a retired U.S. Army colonel, is a senior fellow on
military affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
Email at dan at fcnl.org ]